Young children demonstrate improved metacognitive competence in social contexts

Metacognition – the capacity to represent and reflect upon our knowledge and its sources – is fundamental for higher cognition and learning. Yet, developmental research suggests that metacognition emerges surprisingly late, not before school age. However, this research has assumed that metacognition is optimized for private reflection and therefore tested children’s metacognitive judgments in individual settings. In contrast, recent theoretical approaches propose that metacognition may have a primarily social function and should therefore become most evident in socio-communicative contexts. To test this, we conducted two preregistered studies (N = 130) in which 3- and 5-year-old children participated in a social version of a well-established metacognition task (partial ignorance task). Children had to communicate their uncertainty towards a cooperative partner who relied on their advice. Even 3-year-olds demonstrated metacognitive competence under these conditions: They spontaneously and explicitly expressed uncertainty when they were partially ignorant, but not when they were knowledgeable. Two preregistered control studies (N = 65) confirmed that the enhanced metacognitive performance in the first two studies was indeed mainly due to the socio-communicative context rather than other factors. These findings support the claim that metacognition is primarily a socio-cognitive capacity.